“The mystery genre is moral in itself, for in it that which was hidden is made plain, justice is achieved, and events often turn on a simple dispensation of grace.”

-- Fred Baue, "Mystery and Morality"

 

The first supernatural light upon nature is the light of precept: God commands or forbids something that the mind itself can recognize as right or wrong.  Telling us what we already know or could have known may seem superfluous.  Yet, as equatorial sunlight prickles the skin, so revelation prickles the mind and wakes it up, and it does this in several different ways.